Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is a senator in Washington State, Karen Keiser. Senator Keiser is currently the president pro tempore of that chamber and chairs the Labor and Commerce Committee. The Democrat represents a suburban district south of Seattle. Prior to serving in the state legislature, Senator Keiser was the communications director for a chapter of the AFL-CIO and also a television journalist. She's with me today because she has recently published a book titled, “Getting Elected is the Easy Part: Working and Winning in the State Legislature”. Senator Keiser, welcome to the program.
Karen Keiser: Thank you so much. It's very, very nice to be with you.
GR: Well, we're glad that you could make the time to be with us. So let me just start with the title, “Getting Elected Is the Easy Part”. In my career as a political scientist, I've spent a lot of time watching and speaking with candidates. And to me, at least, it seems like getting elected can be very hard, especially in a purple district. So tell me what message about politics and the legislature that your title is intended to convey.
KK: Right. Well, it's a little bit of a joke, but it's also the fact that we spend so much time, energy and money on getting elected and so little time on getting prepared to be a good lawmaker. And to becoming someone who can have what we call, “policy chops” to get stuff done. So you get elected, you come into a legislative body with the wind at your back thinking you're going to change the world overnight. Well, that doesn't happen, right? The next thing that happens is sort of cynicism or discouragement sets in. And a few years later, they sort of wander away. Now, if you're going to spend all that time or money getting elected and you're going to have all those advocates lined up to help you, and then you wander away and do something else after four or five years, that's a total waste of talent and effort. So it was my goal to encourage urge new lawmakers that get elected to know that there's a whole lot of stuff they can do, but they need to know how to work it and how to make it happen. And there's a lot of learning to happen. You don't just learn it overnight. It's kind of slow and steady.
GR: Well, your book has lots of great advice. And also, I think to the general reader, a lot of inside insights into how the place works. So let me ask you this though, I was very curious to hear your answer to this. You came in as a former broadcast journalist, and, as I said before, a communications director for an interest group. So you obviously come into this political world with a lot of knowledge and understanding, you've been a close observer of it. So I'm curious, as a candidate, let's take candidate first and then we'll get there as an elected official. But as a candidate running for office, what most surprised you, despite your previous knowledge, talking to these people?
KK: Well, I tell you, I never had run for office before. I had put my name on the ballot to become a precinct committee officer. But that was about it. The first election I had and I was in a purple district at that time, and the Republicans were in control of our Washington State House at that time. So my first election was tough and I think I won by less than two points, and it was hard fought. And I'll tell you, the most important thing I learned was talking to real people at their doorstep and hearing what they had to tell you about their neighborhood and what you learned about their neighborhood walking around it was extraordinarily important. It's just an intuition and grounding that you get just by that one on one conversation, it’s so important.
GR: Yeah, I've had the same impression watching, it's interesting that you say that. And then, so after you're elected and you start to serve, what is the thing about the legislature that most surprised you? Just, you weren't expecting to have to learn?
KK: Well, you know, I walked into that legislature with a lot of hubris because, yes, I had been a reporter, I had covered the legislature as a reporter, right? I had been in communications with the AFL-CIO. We reported on legislative issues and gone to committee hearings and so forth. So I thought I knew what I was doing and then I got elected and then I found out I didn't know anything. I needed to learn it from the ground up. And so one of the first things I learned, and I had, I believe it was a gift to be in the minority for the first few years of my career because I didn't get to do much. The Republicans in charge were out for revenge after being out of control for so long. So they didn't let any Democrats get anything done at that time. It was highly partisan right after the Newt Gingrich revolution thing. Anyway, so I was able to sit back, watch, observe and listen. And that's probably the most valuable lessons I've learned is to find out what people were, where they were really coming from, not what they were saying.
GR: Hmm. And as far as the way legislatures work, your book really lays that out. What do you think are the most important things about the working of a state legislature that the public doesn't know and or doesn't fully appreciate that you'd want to share with our listeners?
KK: Well, it really is like making sausage, that's an apt comparison. You know, it is mushing and mashing and grinding and flavoring, all of the pieces of the meat that you're going to end up with. So it is a slow process. That's one thing people don't really understand between the hearings, the committees, the gatekeepers, getting out of one chamber into a second chamber, getting out of both chambers, getting the governor to find something that he might want to veto because it has something in there that might upset him. All of those pieces have to be strategized and you have to think ahead. You can't just walk in and think, I'm going to have this wonderful hearing and people are going to testify. It's going to be wonderful. And think you've done your job. That's just setting the stage. There's so many steps to go after that. And that's what people learn slowly sometimes because it is a complicated process. And it's intentionally complicated because the vast majorities of bills that are introduced, die. They don’t (unintelligible) passed. And it always amuses me that in the first part of a legislative session that the public and the news media always report on bills that are introduced. Like, that's a big damn deal, ha! It's the very first baby step.
GR: It's interesting, I had some training in political philosophy. And there's a quote from this German philosopher, Max Weber, that what you are saying reminds me of, and that his definition of politics was the slow boring of hard boards.
KK: (laugher) That’s so appropriate! It took me 20 years, 20 years virtually, to get our state Paid Family and Medical Leave bill passed and into law. It was a very difficult, I actually passed it twice. The first time, then the Great Recession hit so got set aside and we had to start all over again. But it is a very slow, difficult process and if you don't persevere and maintain your intention and your goal, you won't get it done.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Washington State Senator Karen Keiser. She's the author of, “Getting Elected Is the Easy Part: Working and Winning in the State Legislature”. So is that family leave law that you just mentioned, would you regard that as your biggest accomplishment or success so far as an individual legislator?
KK: I'm not sure. It's really been a very popular program, and it was implemented during the pandemic and was incredibly helpful to tens of thousands of families. But getting, I worked very closely with the federal government on getting what was called Obamacare passed and pulling that end as well. I was health co-chair at the time and we worked very closely with the White House and with our congressional delegations to get that done. That was kind of the last time we were able to do that kind of coordination. And that was huge because we reduced our un-insurance rate for health care from 16% to 5%. So that was amazing. But then just two years ago, I was really thrilled to be able to pass overtime pay for farm workers. We have a large agricultural industry in our state. And as you probably know, Grant, way back in the 1930’s, the federal government excluded farm workers at the insistence of the southern Senators from the Fair Labor Standards Act. So they didn't get overtime, they didn't get any of the basic safety net labor standards. So it's, we're able at the state level, and we need to learn this lesson in all of our state legislatures to thread needles to get around some of our federal limits. We've done this on minimum wage, for example. We can do it on overtime, ee can do it on non-disclosure contracts as long as it's a contract issue that you're dealing with. It's all kinds of technical things. You can really make real change.
GR: Yeah. It's interesting that you brought that last piece of legislation up. Washington State a little bit ahead of New York on that, because New York just went through that decision to include the agricultural laborers and that has been very controversial. And you can imagine the dynamics between the downstate and the upstate where the upstate relies on that.
KK: That’s right, we have eastern and western, same problem.
GR: That's right. Yes, that's right. There's a book I'm going to blank on the name of the author, but the author (David Guterson) also wrote, “Snow Falling on Cedars” about the state of Washington. And makes a lot about that ridge of the Cascades dividing east and west, yeah.
KK: It's a beautiful book.
GR: Yeah. So, okay, those are the good things, right? So what have been your biggest disappointments or failures?
KK: I don't dwell on failures, but I have had my face plants, I'll tell you. One was, this was a really strange thing, I thought hairdressers should get, should be treated as employees, hairstylists should be treated as employees and earn things like unemployment insurance and worker compensation coverage and all of the other things that come with being an employee, health insurance and so forth. But we have a law in our state that allows hairdressers to purchase a chair in a salon, and then they become their own employee, their own independent contractor, if you would. And they have persuaded themselves that that independence is more important. So when we had a hearing on the bill, I had a thousand hairdressers just show up to protest (laughter) and they were stretched out, you know, into the parking lot. It was really something to hear. And of course, the entire hearing was them opposing my bill (laughter).
GR: So that one, that one didn't go anywhere, I take it.
KK: Oh, lots of bills don't go anywhere, as I said. And I think also one of your jobs is to provoke, to put forward the issue. So you provoke questions and questioning. I put forward a bill a couple of years ago to require that all internships be paid at least the minimum wage. Oh, well, listen, here's an issue. Do you know that we have all of our health professions as requiring people with degrees in nursing or whatever to have clinical hours? That means working on the job. It's a very valuable thing to do, but they don't get paid for it. In fact, they have to pay tuition to do it. The same with teaching, do you know that teachers go through their college, get their degree then they have to do student teaching. They don't get paid for that either. So when I open that box and sort of saw the incredible extent to which we are depending on unpaid labor for our professional training, I was shocked and appalled. But I realized this could not be changed in a year.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Washington State Senator Karen Keiser. She's the president pro tempore of that body and she chairs the Labor and Commerce Committee there. She's also the author of, “Getting Elected Is the Easy Part: Working and Winning in the State Legislature” and we've been discussing her book. So you alluded to this, I think, a little bit earlier in our conversation, but I want to ask you a direct question about it. Political polarization, that is the, you know, the drawing apart of the two parties and that having a rigid line between them, the lack of cooperation across the aisle, the lack of even conversations across the aisle. It's arguably our deepest political challenge, I think, in recent decades for us as a nation. And for a long time, state and local offices seem to be less affected by that than the national political scene. But that seems to be changing or have changed, really. And I wanted to ask you about your experience about that, political polarization as you've experienced it in Washington State and have you seen it change since you were first elected to the State House back in 1996?
KK: Well, as I said Grant, when I was first elected, it was just after the Newt Gingrich Contract on America thing, and there was great animosity and polarization at that time. It was really harsh. And it had, when I when I contributed my work in the House, that the House chamber seems to have a much more rigid approach in terms of partisan alignment, maybe because many more members in the House generally, and you have caucuses that really depend on having discipline and people falling into line. And when I got over to the Senate, there's a real difference in culture between the two chambers. In my experience in the Senate, it is considered a virtue to try and get some bipartisan support. And it is not easy, but it is an effort and it works in the end. Because we have become more of a blue state than we used to be. We used to flip back and forth in our chambers, but I've been in the minority three times and in the majority three times. So you want to have relationships with people across the aisle because you don't know after the next election where you're going to be exactly. So there's that, don't have the hubris to think you're going to be in the majority all your life. And secondly, we've found that when you pass things on a simply partisan basis, it's possible that they will be repealed in the future. And in fact, and you've brought this up in your book, we currently in this political season have, I believe, five initiatives coming forward to repeal several bills that we passed in the last three or four years, including our Climate Commitment Act and it is going to be difficult. In the past, initiatives have been more proactive about things like raising the minimum wage or providing other benefits. This one is on repealing legislative action, which has a suite of initiatives that were bought and paid for by a very, very millionaire deep pocket advocate. And he paid for the signatures and he got the signatures to the ballot. And we're going to have to deal with the issues that he's bringing forward again.
GR: Often on those the names of those initiatives are intentionally misleading.
KK: Very misleading and very simple. Initiatives are bad law generally, they’re very poorly written and often have to be changed. But politicians are very leery of initiatives.
GR: So you've got a chapter in your book on compromise without compromising on values. We do hear that phrase a lot from elected officials. So convince me that this isn't only a slogan. Because it might seem that compromising to get something necessarily involves giving up something of what you value in order to get a deal at all.
KK: There's several different methods. Okay, fundamentally, I come out of a background where I negotiated union contracts, right? And union contracts are very similar in some ways. You want to come out of it with a win-win for everybody because you want the company to survive and you want your members to be better off. So that's going after something on a win-win basis as opposed to a zero sum basis and that's just a style of negotiating. Now to get there, generally, I find that you need to have some things to give away, which means your original bill has to have some items that you will work, you know you could give away. So always know your bottom line, know where you can give and where you have to walk away. And that's my fundamental approach to negotiating, and it's been pretty successful over time, but I had to learn it by doing.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Washington State Senator Karen Keiser. What different kinds, if you can name them or describe them, what different kinds of ambitions have you encountered from your colleagues as an elected official? And are there any kinds of ambitions that you think are dangerous to the system?
KK: Well, I don't like to categorize people too much. So, I would just say that some people come to a legislative body as a stepping stone in a game plan, and it may be a political game plan or it may be a professional game plan, but it's not viewed as an avocation or as a profession. It's viewed as a stepping stone to some other goal. And people realize after not very long that you're just in their way. So that's one ambition that I've seen. But I will also say the vast majority of legislators on both sides of the aisle are really in it because they care about their communities. They really care to make things better for the people that they represent. I will say some of them have a very narrow view of who they represent and maybe come from a very, very limited perspective. But one of the great things about legislatures are you meet people from all over who have different perspectives. Your jaw drops sometimes, I never will forget being told that requiring lifejackets when a kid is in a boat is an interference of parental rights. I was absolutely stunned at that assertion. That was beyond my comprehension. But that was one of our members and you had to work with her.
GR: I have a right to have my child drown (laughter).
KK: Yeah, exactly. And so, you do, your eyes wide and your jaw drops to the floor and you can't believe what you're hearing. But you then have to think about that because they're coming from somewhere that you've never been.
GR: Right. Yeah, it's interesting. So, now you've got a chapter in your book on balancing work and family life. And you mentioned this earlier, and thank you for the shout out, I wrote a book on state legislators in different states a while back and I found that that challenge was really huge for many of them. Just that's one of the things that surprised me was just how much they struggled with this and is not only the toll that the service that they were in, public service took on their family life in terms of time and commitments and so on, but also on their financial situation, because in most states, state and local legislators aren't paid very much, they're not as heavily professionalized as they are in other states and even in New York here. This is one of the states that's got the highest pay for state legislators in the country. Most of those folks would earn more and other jobs if they were in other jobs with their skill sets and their resume. So it often involves taking a pay cut. So tell me a bit of what you think about this challenge, what you've learned about it, concerns that you have about these kinds of issues.
KK: Well, it's a huge barrier I'm sorry to say, to so many people who could be wonderful lawmakers because they cannot afford to take a pay cut. Or most legislatures in our country, state legislatures are part time jobs. And even though they're part time in a session level, they're really not that part time. You work when you're out of session as well and your pay is part time. So it's very difficult for anybody who is not independently wealthy or having a spouse that supports them or having a job that they can keep and go to the legislature. I was so lucky to have an employer who allowed me to take unpaid leave while I was either campaigning or in the legislature or doing legislative work. And by not having to quit my job and take just a legislative salary, I could not have afforded to do that. I had three kids, I was a single mom, I couldn't do that. And most people have to figure that out before they take the plunge. This is very important for them to think about, because you're going to have to pay for daycare when you're campaigning and when you're in the legislature and all that kind of thing. But you don't have any benefits to take care of that except for a part time salary. You need to have a support system that can be dependent on. It doesn't have to be a spouse, it doesn't have to be a parent. It can be friends and other acquaintances that you can count on back home in your district. The other the other piece is not just financial, but it's also mental because you spend so much of your waking hours working on puzzling out problems or working on finding solutions or going to events because you have to make appearances. You know, I haven't had a 4th of July or Labor Day off in 20 years. And so you miss a lot of family time in that and it just has to be accommodated somehow. I used to take, I used to have a rule to basically take a month off in sometime in August or early September and just be. And I think that's a little bit of balance there. But it's a tough job and you have to think ahead to figure out how to do it. It is actually a barrier for people who, like I said, don't have, come from a secure background economically and don't have a secure situation with their family. I ended up getting divorced because I just couldn't balance it all. And I thought, well, I'll be a good mom but I wasn't a very good wife.
GR: I've heard I've heard those stories a lot from legislators. Well, we've got only about 2 minutes left or so, but I want to try to squeeze in two more questions, if I can. The first one is, your book was written, and you're open and honest about this, your book was written from your own experiences and perspectives as a liberal or progressive Democratic member of the state legislature. And oftentimes, I think as I'm reading it, it seems like you're kind of speaking to those folks primarily, not exclusively, but primarily so I just wanted to get you, if you could briefly tell me, because I have one final thing I want to ask you, but briefly, what value for a more conservative or moderate reader is going to be found in this book?
KK: Well, I think that the making of sausage is universal. What party you depend on or belong to doesn't matter. The process is the process and you're going to have to go through every step of that process, whichever way you go in terms of your political leanings. And I think the human reality is also something that is really beyond partisanship, which is you learn from other people that have different perspectives. And I have to admit, I learned from people who come from the Republican side of the aisle. And I hope that Republicans learn from the people on the Democratic side of the aisle, too. If you close your mind and your ears to learning, you might as well just hang it up.
GR: I think what you just said in my own view is one of the biggest problems with political polarization right now is that it does cause that closing of the mind to happen, unfortunately. So just about half a minute left. Final bottom line question for you, is politics still a noble profession?
KK: I don't know that it ever was a noble profession, but I do think that it is in danger right now that the public disdain and the sort of honest skepticism about politics is something we've always had in our country. But what I am getting very concerned about is this dark cynicism, which does seem to pervade almost all conversations now.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. We didn't have that dark cynicism in our conversation, though, on a note which I'm glad. That was Karen Keiser and again, her new book is titled, “Getting Elected Is the Easy Part: Working and Winning in the State Legislature”. Senator Keiser, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me, I really enjoyed this.
KK: Thank you very much, Grant.
GR: You've been listening to the conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
